Spirit Lake sits just North of America’s most famous active volcano, Mount St. Helens¹.

The most catastrophic eruption of Mount St Helens was in May of 1980, which killed 57 people.

A side effect of this eruption was the largest landslide in recorded history when the north face of the mountain collapsed, knocking 400m off its official height in the process.

But I digress, this post is supposed to be about the lake! During the 1980 eruption thousands of trees which had covered the mountainside were ripped up and deposited in Spirit Lake. Today, almost 28 years later, they’re still there.

The Douglas Fir logs are slowly sinking to the bottom, but it’s a very slow process. Interestingly, the Google Earth image is clearly a composite of two different photographs, one of which must be more recent; across the seam you can see the tree carpet is there in the northern photo, but the majority of logs have sunk in the southern photo².

More info on Mount St. Helens and Spirit Lake on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Adrian.

This is the Sidoarjo Mud Flow, a massive eruption of gas and hot torrential mud in East Java, Indonesia.

Despite a network of dams and barriers having been erected to contain the flood, as of February 2007 the mud was up to 10 m thick, with an estimated volume of 12 million cubic metres. The enormous quantity of mud has so far buried 4 villages and 25 factories, some of which you can see here, barely protruding above the surface.

Although the mud flow is one of many Mud Volcanoes found worldwide, this particularly devastating eruption is actually the result of nearby gas exploration. The drilling activity evidently triggered an “underground blow out” which apparently could have been prevented if the proper safety procedures had been observed.

The oil and gas exploration company deemed culpable for this, one of Indonesia’s worst ever industrial disasters, will be responsible for financing the repairs and compensating the victims (if they don’t manage to weasel out of it that is). Additionally, thirteen executives and engineers now face criminal charges.

Various ideas have been posited that might staunch the flow of mud (or alternatively put it to some use), however so far, all attempts to stop it have failed. Have a look at this photo from a couple of weeks ago¹ to see how much further the mud has spread – and it’s believed that it will keep flowing for years to come.

Read more at Wikipedia. Thanks to Adrian.

I realise we’ve had quite a few volcanoes this week, but you guys keep submitting them, so here’s just one more. This is the Mount Bromo in the Tenggar caldera, Indonesia, which I think looks fantastic with just one solitary puff of smoke leaking from the crater.

Slightly to the north there’s a lake (which could be an old volcano itself I suppose) which has an odd collection of grid-like objects floating on it. Answers on a postcard please…

Thanks to Arthur van Leeuwen, blouet, Asprine, Alastair Dodd and Tggb3k.

Well that’s all the volcanoes I’m posting today, but if any of this has sparked an interest in things of a geological nature, then despair not. Over at Google Earth Blog you can find out how to pinpoint virtually every volcano on our planet in Google Earth – which I thoroughly recommend trying it out as (apart from the wealth of information included), all of these volcanoes look absolutely awesome in 3D

Furthermore, with today’s Maps update, many of the volcanoes we’ve linked to over the last year are now covered by high-resolution imagery, including Mount Hood, Pacaya, Barcena, Ilamatepec and Hawaii!

This latest update is seriously awesome, so get exploring, and send us your sights!

Thanks to the brand new image update, Google maps’ satellite imagery now covers the Spanish island of Lanzarote in glorious high-resolution imagery – just in time to make this year’s volcano day! Lanzarote is a volcanic island which consists of literally hundreds of volcanoes – far too many for me to point them all out, but here’s some highlights:

Make sure you do scroll around to get a proper feel for the place though. You could even drop by the the tourist trap to watch guides throwing branches into the ground to be set alight by the heat below the surface!

Wait. That was when I was actually there, and not something I saw in these images….

I was on Lanzarote years ago for a family holiday, which seems strange now as the place should probably be nearly inhospitable – a quarter of the island’s surface is covered by lava, of 213 km of coastline only 10 km are sand (much of which I seem to remember was black), and every year the island is whipped by sandstorms which arrive from Africa carrying Saharan sands!

However this does mean that Lanzarote is pretty much the place to go for wind and kite surfing.

Thanks to Amio cajander and Jedi Master Kalimero.